Peter Lorange has a double life. On the one hand he is a management theorist and the long-serving president of IMD, the Swiss business school. But he is also a successful businessman. When he popped into the FT yesterday, I was more interested in Lorange the doer rather than Lorange the thinker. I wanted to quiz him on the way he was handling his business affairs in order to get first-hand tips for managing in choppy economic conditions. The affable Norwegian’s responses were not what I expected at all.

For a start, it turned out that he sold his shipping business - which moves supplies to and from oil rigs - last year. With disarming candour, he says he has given half of the deal proceeds to UBS to be placed in relatively low-risk investments. The other half has been earmarked for opportunities chosen by him and family members. In contrast to his patiently-constructed shipping company, these are likely to be shorter-term investments that have a clear potential to be “flipped” after 2-4 years. “That requires new thinking for me,” he says, declaring that he has already had success buying shares during recent stock market dips.

I hadn’t been prepared for such a pillar of the management establishment to be so fervent about flipping. Maybe global economic uncertainty has made other approaches to capital allocation too risky at the moment: a clear path to payback outweighs everything else.

But Professor Lorange, who is due to stand down as IMD president at the start of April, has not entirely ditched his old ways. He is also trying to buy two ships that transport live salmon from farm to slaughterhouse, arguing that they occupy an attractive, highly-specialised niche in an industry he knows well.

As a postcript, Lorange the theorist has two pieces of general advice for those trying to manage and lead in a downturn. The first is to promote team unity by stressing the ”we, we, we” rather than the “me, me, me”. The second is to focus any job cuts on less-promising divisions rather than trying to spread them out in an even-handed way across the organisation.

February 22nd, 2008 in Business schools, Capital allocation | Permalink